Musings: Notes From My Daybook

At Northlake we are preparing for VBS--one of the highlights of the year!  This year we go to Rome and to the world of the early Christians.  One of my small tasks is to represent something of the preaching of the early church so I have been reading a lot of sermons from the second to the fourth centuries lately!  One of the best preachers of the fourth century and really of all time was John Chrysostom.  As a preacher myself I found his words on the tension and trouble of appealing to people's attention and acclaim to be a wonderful word to remember.  So I share with you:

    There are many preachers who make long sermons; if they are well applauded, they are as glad as if they had obtained a kingdom; if they bring their sermon to an end in silence, their despondency is worse, I may almost say, than hell. It is this that ruins churches, that you do not seek to hear sermons that touch the heart, but sermons that will delight your ears, just as if you were listening to singers and lute players. And we preachers humour fancies instead of trying to crush them. We act like a father who gives a sick child a cake or an ice, or something else that is merely nice to eat – just because he asks for it; and takes no pains to give him what is good for him; and then when the doctors blame him says, “I could not bear to hear my child cry”. That is what we do when we elaborate beautiful sentences, fine combinations and harmonies, to please and not to profit, and not to better your conduct. Believe me, I am not speaking at random; when you applaud me as I speak, I feel at the moment as it is natural for a man to feel. I will make a clean breast of it. Why should I not? I am delighted and overjoyed. And when I go home and reflect that the people who have been applauding me have received no benefit, and indeed that whatever benefit they might have had has been killed by the applause, I feel as though I had spoken altogether in vain, and I say to myself, “What is the good of all your labours, seeing that your hearers don’t want to reap any fruit out of all that you say?” And I have often thought of laying down a rule prohibiting all applause, and urging you to listen in silence.
 

Well said!